Site Mobile Navigation

One Game Forces the Chiefs to Change Their Approach

Before Sunday, the Chiefs backup Damon Huard had not completed a pass since 2000. He completed 12 for 140 yards against Cincinnati, but was sacked four times.Credit
Ed Zurga/Associated Press

The good news, Herman Edwards was quick to point out, is that the Kansas City Chiefs have a bye in Week 3. Edwards subscribes to the power of positive thinking and had plenty of occasions to hone that skill with the Jets. And he is going to need the full force of his amiable personality to salvage the Chiefs’ season after one disastrous game, a 23-10 loss to Cincinnati.

That is why Edwards found himself apologizing, only half-jokingly, to Trent Green for being a bad omen for his quarterbacks. Green was lying in a hospital at the time with a severe concussion that could keep him out four to six weeks, according to Edwards.

He is a coach who has had plenty of experience with such calamity. Chad Pennington sustained injuries during three of Edwards’s seasons with the Jets, including a broken wrist in the final preseason game in 2003.

Those Jets teams had playoff aspirations, just as the Chiefs have this season. But the Jets did not have to face rebuilding a defense while dealing with a devastating injury to what had been the league’s highest-ranked offense.

The Chiefs’ backup quarterback, Damon Huard, will start tomorrow in an American Football Conference West game at Denver. Until he replaced Green in the third quarter against the Bengals, Huard had not completed a pass in the N.F.L. since 2000.

“You shake your head and say, ‘This ain’t real,’ ” Edwards said in a telephone interview this week. “It will be a little harder. It will put a little bit more pressure on the defense. It’s kind of like the year we made the change with Vinny Testaverde — we put Chad in. We played a little different. Obviously, the running game will be more of a focus.”

The first week of the season went disastrously awry for the Chiefs, whose greatest concern in training camp was the sudden retirement of left tackle Willie Roaf, an 11-time Pro Bowl selection. Green had not missed a start in five years — a span of 81 games — for the Chiefs. During that time, Kansas City gained more yards, scored more touchdowns and rushed for more touchdowns than any team in the league.

But Cincinnati defensive end Robert Geathers hit Green late in the third quarter as Green was attempting to slide feetfirst. Green was knocked out cold. The National Football League ruled it a clean hit this week.

The Chiefs had been counting on Green and Larry Johnson to be the pillars of their offense while Edwards worked to improve the defense. But the offense struggled early against the Bengals, even before the loss of Green.

The Chiefs were playing with two new tackles on what had been the league’s best offensive line. On their second possession, the Chiefs moved the ball to the Cincinnati 27, then ran Johnson five consecutive times, the final one on third-and-5 from the 11. Johnson ran into the pile, and boos rained down at Arrowhead Stadium.

It became clear after the game that the offensive coordinator, Mike Solari, had lost track of the down or the distance on the play, a mix-up that reminded some of the game-management troubles that occasionally marked Edwards’s tenure in New York.

Photo

Chiefs Coach Herman Edwards has seen a disastrous injury strike his teams before. He dealt with the problem in three of his five seasons with the Jets.Credit
Tim Umphrey/Getty Images

“A lot of people are making a big deal out of that, but it’s the first quarter,” Edwards said. “You’d have liked to have done something different, but that didn’t happen. Big deal. That’s no fault of anybody’s.”

Last year, the Chiefs finished 10-6 but missed the playoffs. And despite five years of success on offense, they have reached the playoffs only once, in 2003, and they lost that game.

After the retirement of Coach Dick Vermeil, the franchise tried to right the team’s imbalance and shore up the defense. Edwards figured he had a two-year window to take advantage of the vaunted but aging offense. Now, that window closes a bit with each game Green misses.

The other big loss of the off-season was the offensive coordinator Al Saunders, who accepted the Redskins’ offer of $2 million. Saunders and Vermeil believed in attacking on every down. Edwards and Solari favor controlling the clock on offense to keep the opponent’s offense off the field while they work to rebuild the Chiefs’ defense.

“Any good defense, if they have to play more than 30 minutes, they are in trouble,” Edwards said before the season began.

Green admitted in an interview before the season that he was still learning to anticipate Solari’s play preferences. Green was so concerned about the perception that the offense would chafe at Edwards’s style that he spoke to Edwards soon after his arrival and assured him that the veteran offense wanted only to win.

“There may be games where we need to score 35 or 40 points, but there may also be games you manage differently than in the past,” Green said. “We had a lot of success, but we need to have playoffs success.”

Guard Brian Waters added: “This organization for years was a physical, bust-you-in-the-mouth football team. That’s what real football is about. You look at teams that have won — Pittsburgh, New England, the Dallas Cowboys — those are physical running teams.”

Edwards’s goal before the season seemed modest; he wanted the defense to finish in the top 15. For the Chiefs to have playoff possibilities in a division that includes the Broncos and the Chargers, defensive improvement seemed imperative. After one week, the Chiefs’ offense was ranked 18th. The defense was ranked fifth.

Before the season, Edwards said that if the offense were able to play as well as it did last year and the defense jumped into the top 15, the Chiefs would be a playoff team. Now, the success of the offense rests largely on when Green returns.

“The most important thing he says always is score points,” safety Sammy Knight said of Edwards before the season. “He’s not going to try to shut the offense down. We’re just striving to be better than we were. When you look at last year, we had some good games and we had some bad games. The problem is we had bad games at the wrong time.”